Picture the Homeless

Background & Precedents PDF file

Every neighborhood in the city is full of unoccupied, boarded-up buildings. Abandoned buildings are an emblem of urban blight, drive down property values, and increase the tax burden on everyone. These properties are also an underutilized asset, and rehabilitation of buildings into housing is an incredible potential boon to communities—it is estimated that for every dollar invested in housing, $9-27 are generated in the community where it is spent. The City’s current prioritizing of a $700-million-a-year shelter system does nothing to build communities, nor does it enable homeless people to move out of homelessness and into stable homes.

After months of issue identification, interviews with housing and legislative experts, and collective problem-solving, members of the Housing Committee at Picture the Homeless developed a plan—a comprehensive legislative platform to address the rehabilitation of these buildings into housing for very-poor New Yorkers. The demands of this platform are as follows:

• Declaration of a “Housing Emergency” by the Mayor and a commitment to identifying solutions within the Implementation Task Force framework—and the use of his position to stigmatize empty buildings and apartments, not homeless people.
• Active lobbying by the City for a redefinition of HUD’s “affordability” guidelines to prioritize families and individuals making $11,000 a year and under as “extremely low-income” for purposes of eligibility for “affordable” housing.
• Establishment of a no-interest revolving door loan fund (“NYC Homeless Housing Fund”) to allocate funds for landlords who demonstrate willingness but are unable to fix up their buildings or pay steep fines.
• Creation of an independent “Homeless Housing Trust” (HHT), including homeless and formerly homeless New Yorkers, to oversee implementation and funding of this plan.
• Creation of a Dedicated Revenue Stream to funnel tax-derived money directly into the Homeless Housing Fund.
• Empowerment of NYC Department of Buildings to expand the Building Code (Section [643a-13.0] 26-127 ) concerning “nuisance” buildings, to declare specific unoccupied boarded-up buildings “nuisances” on the grounds that they are “detrimental to the life or health” of the community at large, including homeless people. In such cases the DOB Commissioner is already empowered to “order or cause any excavation, building, sewer, plumbing, pipe, passage, ground, matter or thing or the lot on which it is situated to be purified, cleansed, disinfected, removed, altered, repaired or improved”—In practice we would like to see the Commissioner begin using that authority to actively force these underutilized units to be converted into housing for homeless people and extremely poor.
• Empowerment of NYC HPD to levy an annual fine against non-compliant landlords in an amount equivalent to the cost of bringing the building online—with a corresponding commitment from DOB to actively assess identified properties for the cost of bringing them online. In addition to penalties, there should also be mechanisms within the NYC Homeless Housing Fund to provide incentives and rewards to participating landlords.
• As part of downsizing the shelter population, and funneling resources from shelter to housing, DHS should develop a mechanism by which shelter residents can “opt out” of their shelters, with the money currently being paid by the City to their shelter being transferred into the NYC Homeless Housing Fund.
• Empowerment of HPD’s Division of Alternative Management Programs (DAMP) to mandate a meeting between the HHT and the landlord/landlord’s rep.
• Perhaps most importantly, the establishment of extensive private funding streams, including active rallying by the Mayor to raise funds from banks and corporations and other private sources for the NYC Homeless Housing Trust Fund.